What's the point of research if it doesn't get into the hands of practitioners? That's the idea behind Usable Knowledge, the new education research website from the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University.

The site will provide smart, practical and timely content relating to both K-12 and higher education. The content will highlight the researcher of Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty.

"The goal is to put that knowledge directly into the hands of practitioners who can use it to make a difference in their classrooms, schools, districts, universities, and communities," according to the Usable Knowledge website.

Founded in 1920, the Harvard Graduate School of Education is grounded in the belief that education is the "most pressing issue of our time, and that research-based education policy and practice have the power to create a more just and prosperous society," according to its website.

Under fierce pressure to do more with less, colleges today need improvement strategies that are simultaneously reliable, powerful, available, and cheap.

There is one step colleges can take right now to engage students, without spending a cent or creating a new program: They can encourage more face-to-face human contact. Such human contact may be the key to workable improvement strategies.

The influence of friends, teachers, and mentors on students’ careers can be truly pervasive, running from start to finish. What matters most in college, then, is who meets whom, and when.

The 2014 Gallup-Purdue Index found that having "a mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams," "professors who cared about me," and "at least one professor who made me excited about learning" made students far more likely to be successful later in life.

At its heart, higher education is a human activity, powered primarily by bringing thinkers together. So rather than attending so much to programs and policies, maybe higher education should focus first on its people, and on helping them find—and eventually care about—one another.

The online-learning collaborative edX is expanding its reach beyond higher education and will begin offering courses geared toward high school students. The 26 high school courses were created by 14 institutions — including MIT, Georgetown and Rice universities, the University of California Berkeley, Boston University, Wellesley College, and Weston Public High School.

The online classes, available to anyone in the world, will cover such subjects as computer science, calculus, geometry, algebra, English, physics, biology, chemistry, Spanish, French, history, statistics, and psychology.

Anant Agarwal, chief executive of edX, said the offerings will help address a “readiness gap” that leaves a significant number of high school students unprepared for college studies.

One high school course will aim to help students “demystify” the process of applying to selective colleges — understanding admissions requirements, navigating financial aid, and trying to help high school students match a college to their interests.

In the summer of 2011 MOOCs appeared seemingly out of nowhere and changed the education landscape forever. Fast-forward to 2014, and change has come indeed. But while MOOCs have changed the education landscape, MOOCs themselves have changed too.

Any educational process has at least three essential phases: 1) exposure to content, 2) learning the content, 3) verifying that the content has been learned. MOOCs have provided an easy way to scale the first phase with technology.

However, learning is most often a social process. The MOOC 2.0 will provide scaling for the second phase — the learning phase — by scaling 1-on-1, face-to-face learning. The technology is already in place and widely available: video chat.

The student who learns everything by just listening does not exist — everyone gets to a point where understanding is blocked. That’s where the teaching assistant (TA) comes in. The MOOC TA also serves a different purpose: that of convenience. Getting instant help when we get stuck while learning can dramatically speed up the learning process.

Introduction to Key Concepts in Five Minutes or Less: The "Did You Know?"
Microlecture SeriesFaculty Focus

The traditional, hour-long lecture that is so familiar to on-the-ground undergraduates has little place in an online learning environment. A shorter, more tightly focused microlecture can help engage learners and add a multimedia punch to a course.

As online educators seek to add more interactivity to their courses, the microlecture format seemingly offers great potential, allowing students greater ownership of their learning while reducing cognitive load.

Microlectures (snippets) are simple multimedia presentations that are 90 seconds to five minutes long. They focus on a specific concept or skill associated with the course’s learning objectives. Microlectures allow students to access instruction on a specific concept or skill they need to practice.

“Microlecture capture” is an umbrella term that describes any technology that allows instructors to record what happens in their classrooms and make it available digitally. Lecture capture is a methodology employed to capture information from a lecture in single or multiple channels, with the intent to deliver on-demand lectures to users through a Web-based interface.

What Does it Take to Be a Teacher? Teacher Time Management InfographicKnewton

According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, teachers around the world work up to 11 hours a day. As any teacher knows, every activity that occurs in the classroom can require a good deal of preparation and grading outside of class.